Our Movie Themed 30th Birthday Bash!

My Husband and I share our birthdays approximately 2 weeks apart, so we knew that it was going to be best to share a 30th Birthday celebration.Neither of us have had a birthday party since our 21st, and will be unlikely to have another until our 40th, so we decided to go all out!

We actually settled on a movie theme almost a year earlier. It was the only theme that we deemed suitable for the both of us. Originally our plan was to have a backyard movie party. However we realised the weather was too unpredictable, and our guest list grew.

We hired a local hall, booked catering and wrote up a guest list.

Now was the fun part. Planning. We both actually really enjoyed planning this celebration and commented to each other that we hadn't put in this much effort since our wedding! In fact, my Husband thinks he put in more for this celebration!

The Food

I love to cook, and usually I insist on making everything for a celebration from scratch. Yet, this time I decided to get it catered. I looked around at different catering options and found you can have woodfire pizza, made fresh. They turn up with a woodfire oven on the back of a trailer, dough and all the toppings for a variety of pizzas. The pizza was unlimited for 3 hours, and included entree, main and even dessert pizza.

It was a huge hit, people ate until their bellies were full, and we had about 20 boxes of leftover pizza at the end of the night! (These were pressed on people as they left, so happily we only took home 3 savour and 3 sweet).

I also made 2 salads and had a fruit and cheese platter, although truthfully these were not really needed.

The Cake

I do a bit of cake decorating on the side, so I made the cake. I was pleased with how it turned out, and wasn't too difficult. Although it was meant to be two tiers, however one tier didn't look right so I took it off and just cut it up when serving cake later.

The decoration

I had pinned a variety of ideas for table centrepices using news reels and other movie items. However, I found that to buy some cheap plastic reels would be $13 a table, which I thought was too expensive given we wouldn't use them again.

Instead, I decided to use some large popcorn buckets, and have some helium balloons in the colour theme inside them.

Around the walls we had some Elvis and Marylin posters (We had actually won these a year ago at a work trivia night, along with some movie themed plates and some banners. It was after we had already decided to have a movie themed party). We also found on the internet some high definition movie posters, and printed them at my Husbands work in A3, then laminated them, These posters were scattered around the room.

Tables and chairs were part of hall hire, and we were delighted to discover the chairs were black,which matched the roll of black tablecloth we used on the tables.

Entertainment

My Husband is a movie buff, and knows so much movie trivia, so he decided he wanted to have a trivia competition though the night. We spent a few weeks coming up with questons, making the slideshow, downloading movie clips for some of the questions and making answer cards.

Despite some questions being way too hard, people seemed to really enjoy the novelty of the trivia and many laughs were had.

For prizes we made up mini popcorn tubs filled with chocolate bars and microwave popcorn. The winning table each received a tub. We were lucky because the chocolate bars were on sale when we bought them, so each tub only cost about $6

Candy Bar

I know lolly bars are being done to death, but it is with good reason! They are a crowd pleaser. We used jars that were left over from our wedding and filled them with popcorn. I then borrowed the rest of the jars from a friend and ordered lollies in bulk from an online shop.

We found popcorn boxes that fitted our colour theme, and hung some '30' strings behind as a backdrop.
It looked amazing, and adults and kids alike loved filling up containers through the night, and took some home too!

Kids Corner

We had a few kids attending, including our own daughter, so we decided to set up a corner for them. We put down some rugs, pillows and beanbags in a corner. We set up a mini dvd player, and some crayons with paper. The kids played happily all night and were well behaved.

Dress Up!

We asked everyone to dress up as either a movie character or movie star. Everyone got really into it and looked great! It was a bit of fun, and worked as a good conversation starter with people.

Wolverine, Cleopatra and Jessie!

Our 30th was so much fun. The best part of all was being surrounded by the people we love. It makes you appreciate all you have achieved in 30 years and understand that life is successful when you are surrounded by people you love :)